«

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 02:12:14AM +0900, Gregory Brown wrote:
> I am setting up two threads in the hopes that we can see names
> attached to opinions about the decision to break backwards
> compatibility between Ruby 1.8.6 and Ruby 1.8.7+

Mostly happy. I haven't seen the bogeymen reported by many people in
1.8.7. There is String#chars, but that seemed pretty easy to move
past. If there are crashes, pull out gdb and let's see them. Shoes
has had Ruby 1.8.7 within, since shortly after it was released.

Folks, I'd stay away from the heavy-handed approach with Matz. He
doesn't respond to a mob. And despite all the hype and business that
now revolves around Ruby, it's still the man's language and his life
work.

Sometimes this community feels like one of those marriages where the
lady marries the guy because she thinks she can change the guy.
But the guy's the guy! I don't know.

_why

_why wrote:
> Folks, I'd stay away from the heavy-handed approach with Matz. He
> doesn't respond to a mob. And despite all the hype and business that
> now revolves around Ruby, it's still the man's language and his life
> work.

+1

--
RMagick: http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/

On Feb 11, 2009, at 5:11 PM, _why wrote:

> Folks, I'd stay away from the heavy-handed approach with Matz. He
> doesn't respond to a mob. And despite all the hype and business that
> now revolves around Ruby, it's still the man's language and his life
> work.
>
> ...
> _why
>

+1 for either path that is taken.

On Feb 11, 2009, at 4:11 PM, _why wrote:

> Folks, I'd stay away from the heavy-handed approach with Matz. He
> doesn't respond to a mob.

I agree with this fully and I don't feel like I've joined a mob. I'm
not angry or out of control.

I'm saying the new version process scare me. It's just an FYI for
Matz and the core team. If they ignore it, well, that's how it
goes.

James Edward Gray II

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 5:11 PM, _why <> wrote:

> Folks, I'd stay away from the heavy-handed approach with Matz. He
> doesn't respond to a mob. And despite all the hype and business that
> now revolves around Ruby, it's still the man's language and his life
> work.

Ah, but it's not Matz's issue. I actually love Ruby 1.9.1, and every
time I ask Matz about this he says "I don't maintain 1.8".
The issue is not with change, but with change that something that was
previously labeled non-changing in a defacto way .

-greg

--
Technical Blaag at: http://blog.majesticseacreature.com
Non-tech stuff at: http://metametta.blogspot.com
"Ruby Best Practices" Book now in O'Reilly Roughcuts:
http://rubybestpractices.com

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Daniel Berger <> wrote:
> Given that I have my own fork, I would say the answer is no, I'm not
> happy with the direction of 1.8.x.

Could you give me a link to that fork?
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.

_why wrote:
> Folks, I'd stay away from the heavy-handed approach with Matz. He
> doesn't respond to a mob. And despite all the hype and business that
> now revolves around Ruby, it's still the man's language and his life
> work.
>
> Sometimes this community feels like one of those marriages where the
> lady marries the guy because she thinks she can change the guy.
> But the guy's the guy! I don't know.

Unless, of course, the guy can be convinced that he's causing the lady
some sort of pain and seek to change himself. Quietly ignoring the
problem is what *leads* to mobs and divorces. I think what we're doing
here is entirely appropriate: raise concerns, discuss, hope for change
or compromise.

It may be Matz's language, but it's everyone's community.

- Charlie

> Given that I have my own fork, I would say the answer is no, I'm not
> happy with the direction of 1.8.x.

This is the happy thread and I'm happy with 1.8.7 -- well, sort of but
I personally like the changes I know of. I have to say though that I
find the idea to backport even more 1.9 features to 1.8 as strange as
the idea to forget about 1.8.7 and move back to 1.8.6. I'd have
expected 1.8 to be in maintenance mode after 1.9.1 was released.

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Gregory Brown <>wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 5:11 PM, _why <> wrote:
>
> > Folks, I'd stay away from the heavy-handed approach with Matz. He
> > doesn't respond to a mob. And despite all the hype and business that
> > now revolves around Ruby, it's still the man's language and his life
> > work.
>
> Ah, but it's not Matz's issue. I actually love Ruby 1.9.1, and every
> time I ask Matz about this he says "I don't maintain 1.8".
> The issue is not with change, but with change that something that was
> previously labeled non-changing in a defacto way .
>

Right to the point! I too love Ruby 1.9.1 and Matz! but...

Ruby 1.8 (excluding 1.8.7) and Ruby 1.9 are really two different languages,
I can deal with that as long as I know, and can control which of the two I'm
using at any given time for any given application.

Matz ceded maintenance of the "1.8" stream and moved on to 1.9 some time
ago. The 1.8.7 release, rather than simply fixing bugs and maintaining
compatibility, was attracted by "shiny objects" from 1.9 and wreaked havoc
on some important consumers of Ruby, exacerbated by the eagerness of
downstream package maintainers to keep up without understanding the
ramifications of the breach of the implication of compatibility between
versions with the same minor version number.

Ruby 1.8.6 represents the latest version of the old Ruby language, 1.9.1 is
the latest version of the new Ruby language, Ruby 1.8.7 is a mutant which
just muddies the waters.

--
Rick DeNatale

Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

2009/2/12 Jeremy Henty <>

> On 2009-02-11, Pit Capitain <> wrote:
> > 2009/2/11 Rados?aw Bu?at <>:
> >> h={}
> >> h[{"foo" => 1}] = 100
> >> p h[{"foo" => 1}]
> >>
> >> ruby 1.8.6 prints "nil", 1.8.7 prints "100".
> >
> > Ah, you mean Hash#hash. Thanks a lot, I didn't know that. But this
> > is an example where the 1.8.7 version yields the result most people
> > would expect,
>
> No it doesn't. Most people would expect 1.8.7 to yield the same
> result as 1.8.6 . That is the point.



Though I fall on the 'unhappy' side, this change is clearly fine: 1.8.6
behaviour is clearly a bug and should be fixed, that's the point of bug fix
releases. Relying on buggy behaviour is a bad idea, and so is making changes
to ostensibly correct behaviour in minor releases.